by Steve Adelson, 44 mini lessons from TrueFire. $30.

From the TrueFire Website:

"Ultimate Stick" is a comprehensive, beginner to advanced voyage, presented in 44 easy to understand segments. Starting with simple fretboard navigation and fingering geography, Steve illustrates the logic of the Stick's tuning and layout. Adelson goes through each hand's role, by exploring bass, melody and harmony step by step and then as a homogenous concept. Basic theory is explained and applied to achieve those hard to find complex harmonies.

The viewer of this course will learn to walk a bass line while soloing and comping chords all at the same time. Scales, chords and all musical tools are explored. Adelson also presents basic Stick tools and fingerings as well as unique techniques like "The Claw" and "The Kerchunk."

Emmett's Review

After several sittings with Steve Adelson's just released double DVD set of 44 Stick lessons, the comprehensive Ultimate Stick by TrueFire, I'd like to share my impressions.

Steve's style and method of teaching will grow on you, at least, it had that effect on me. It starts off with lessons on the fundamentals, the layout of The Stick, the dots, the symmetrical tuning, and the simple transpositions across the board. Even then, he takes you "by leaps and bounds" right away to larger terrain - the big picture, graphic, geometric, and how it all fits together.

And it gets more involving as you go, with nearly four hours of wide ranging instruction. Steve's presentation is multidimensional in that he teaches on several levels at once in a relaxed manner. It's not enough that he reveals his most powerfully musical two-handed tapping discoveries, his natural instinct is to make it whole, move it anywhere, apply it to any song or sector of the board. He has always taught by bestowing ownership upon the student, making it your own, and this is how I've always taught Stick as well.

The layered assault on your senses and sensibilities begins obviously enough, with the notes, the fingering, and various devices to get both hands working at the same time. Then you see his hands on the board and they seem unusually nimble and dexterous. Each lick is executed "cold" (no warm-ups), yet the fluid momentum is always there. (He used to be a hobbyist magician but never mind that.)

His purpleheart "solar" Grand Stick is set up for very low action and light touch but still, he makes it all look so incredibly easy. Those floating fingers and flicks of the wrist might be intimidating to the newcomer except that an entirely different message comes through - that it's all mental. Thus paradoxically, physical ease and comfort are essential to learning Steve's technical skills.

So you have the notes and the fingers, also the vision of gesturing hands playing the connections between the notes. Then one hand will point to the other in action, a different kind of dialogue as he explains his moves. The hands are talking to themselves!

If that's not enough, he'll often conclude a lesson with a philosophical "aside" to the camera, commenting on the larger scope of what has just been taught. "You don't have to repeat history because we're making history." Now he's a personality, so if the fingers don't convince you, his power of communication will.

My interest grew with each succeeding lesson. There's truly a lot there and it gets more intense as it goes. By the second disk, you're into two-handed bass, two-handed melody, modal and blues scales, Latin rhythms, his rhythmic "Claw" and "Kerchunk" techniques, his famous "compass" walking bass (it's alive!), and a polychordal theory of combined triads, one to each hand.

There's a lesson on right-hand expressive finger techniques, which he calls "Articulation". There's another on layered orchestration, adding the right thumb to the left hand and conversely, the left pinky to the right hand. I refer to this sub-technique as "six fingers on each hand" (conceptually as always, of course).

The magician has now given away all his best tricks, but then when he actually plays a song arrangement (and there are several of his performances here), it's still magic and he remains somehow above it all, secure as an artist and stylist despite the revelations.

Easy flow of hands, easy flow of words, all combined into a river of intelligent instruction. There are many creative levels to Steve's presentation, not the least of which is to inspire confidence and loving inspiration within our world wide Stick and string tapping community.

All the Best, Emmett.